Stuff You Should Know - Emojis: A New Language? Nah.

Episode Date: April 24, 2018

Believe it or not, there's a lot more to Emojis than meets the eye. Turns out their history is pretty interesting stuff. Join Josh and Chuck today as they tell the tale of the little faces that we all love to hate.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Smiley Face Bryant and Jerry Party Face Roland.

I got no emoji, I'm just Josh. Wink face. Sure. Eggplant and peach, whoa. I know, that's dirty. But you can say eggplant and peach and get away with it, even on the TV. Sounds like a delightful meal. It does.

Actually, it doesn't at all. No, not at all. It is cute, for sure. I use the Bitmoji now, some. Some. Which I see is not even in this research, so I just thought I'd throw it out there early. I want to go on record at saying that my Bitmoji

is one of the best because I'm honest. Do you even do Bitmoji, do you even have that? Sure, I've got one. Okay, because you design your own thing, so I found that a lot of people's Bitmojis aren't very honest. Oh, I see what you mean, the image of the person. I see.

You know, I've got a little chubby bearded guy. And every time I send it to someone, they're like, oh my God, that looks just like you. And I say, yeah, because I'm honest. Right. I didn't make myself a supermodel. I got you, I got you. I thought you meant you were just like,

like you'd say like, I don't like that and mean it kind of thing. No, I don't know if I've ever sent you a Bitmoji, so I'm gonna do that right now. I don't think you have, Chuck. In real time. Okay. What do you want?

You want me on an elephant? Yes. Or me crying in the rain because you're not near me. Can you cry in the rain on an elephant? I don't think I can combine those. Either one's fine. Elephant, we'll do elephant, I love elephants. Well, I can't find the elephant now.

I'll just blow you a kiss. Okay, so what we're talking about today are not Bitmojis, although they would qualify as a sub type of this, I guess, but they use a lot of words. It's kind of like when you're playing charades and somebody's like, that's close, that's close. It's like, you can't talk, man. You have to just shut up.

You have to charade it. That's the difference between Bitmoji and Emoji, and Emoji is really what we're talking about today, which is a pictograph, basically, like a hieroglyph. Okay, but it's a modern hieroglyphic. Yeah, and I will also go on record of saying, I don't really use emojis anymore because of the Bitmoji.

And I don't use them that often, but it's always funny to send a Bitmoji to someone, like kind of go out on a limb and be like, should I send this? And then you get one back. Like I remember the first time I Bitmoji'd Hajman, I thought he's gonna think I'm just so stupid. And he sent one right back.

He's on the Bitmoji train. I can buy that for sure. Yeah, but I don't use the emojis much anymore, but I did when they, I guess they first kind of hit the scene on the smartphone. Right. And now I get a little, I mean, kissy faces and stuff are fine,

but I don't like when I just get like a thumbs up reply for okay, that's fine. Thumbs up is almost like I can barely tolerate you. Yeah, that's what it feels like to me. That's what they're saying. I can't be bothered to type okay. Right, I say KK, because it really kind of takes okay

and turns it even more personal. I always thought you were just jittery. No, I meant to type K and just had a... No, I'm saying KK. Cause I know you have legendarily fast thumbs. I do, it's from all the coffee I drink and the speed. I will also say this, that this article, and I mean, I kind of picked it because,

well, I'm going to be honest, we needed something a little easier this week cause it's a tough week. This is a little more in depth than you may have thought. More in depth and like way more interesting than I thought. Sure. The whole history of it I thought was pretty fascinating. So let's talk about the history of it, man.

The widely agreed upon start date for emojis comes back in 1982, all the way back in 1982. And it wasn't an emoji that first came out. It was what are known as emoticons, the predecessor of emoji. Well, I remember those days when we were all just big dummies and typed colon parentheses. Oh no, wait, it wouldn't be that, that'd be,

that's not even a thing. Yeah, colon parentheses is a smiley face. Oh, I was thinking quotation, sorry. Yeah. So colon and a parentheses either way is a smiley face or a frowny face. And that, we can point to, this is so cool that they know who did this.

But a guy named Scott Falman, and he was either an admin or a frequent user or whatever had something to do with the message board, the electronic message board, which was a very, very early like chat room forum prototype back in 1982 for Carnegie Mellon University. Which we did some time there. We served out of sentence there.

We did. Now we did a little short video at Carnegie Mellon. For days. Yeah, short video for days. But yeah, in 1982 he, I don't even know if you said specifically, but September 19th, actually had the actual date, which is amazing. And he said, on this bulletin board,

if you put a smiley face using this, actually he even gussied it up with the dash as the nose. They lost the dash pretty quick. I like the dash. Do you? I think it's overdone. Do you know what I like? It's like, it's a horse face.

What I like are the people that are, can do like a whole picture out of typing things. Oh yeah, like the shrug guy? Yeah, no, no, no. I mean, like this whole page would be a big rooster. It's like the kids and me, you and everyone we know. Yeah, exactly. They had like the book of those.

That was the cutest touch. Yeah, good movie. That is the one movie that has ever done whimsy right and didn't go over the edge. It was whimsical to an exactly perfect non-annoying degree. So every other movie with whimsy you hate? Yes. Okay.

Like hate. Like shrug guy though. Shrug guy I've never learned to just copy and paste him. Well, I've never done it myself, but I just like the way it looks. And I thought, that's creative because it looks exactly like what it is. Yeah.

And I was always partial to as well to the awkward, which was. Which was that? Colon slash. Oh, that one. It's kind of like, I don't know. I have mixed feelings about because it can also mean like,

while I'm really disappointed or it's like. Sure. That's why I like it, I think. Very versatile. It is versatile, there's a lot to it. All right, so anyway, he said, if you use a smiley face with a colon and that dash and parentheses in your comment

to say it's humorous, then I think we can avoid, it was kind of used to clear up like the ambiguity of text and things like that. Not texting, but sometimes it's hard to read. Like, wait, is this person making a joke? Right, right. So if somebody was joking or being sarcastic. Yeah, like use this thing.

Right, and then the person will know and we won't have an argument on the message board because the person will know you were joking, right? Yeah, and it started in 1982. And what, as we'll see, what Falman hit on the head was the very point that emojis fulfill, which is they add context to plain text. Which is important.

Yeah, so Falman came up with this triumphant victory, like you said, September 19th, 1982. And now he's sitting on a mountain of cash. And, oh yeah, man, he trademarked it very wisely. So hopefully everybody's sending him the money anytime they use that emoticon. But before him, and I thought this was super interesting, people have always, of course, put little smiley faces

and letters and things like that. So this was an extension of that, but some historians say in 1648, Robert Herrick wrote a poem entitled Two Fortune, and it seems as if he is purposefully included in a emoticon in a line, upon my ruins, smiling yet. And he puts a colon and a parentheses after the word smiling, and people say that may have actually

been the very first use of this. Right. I read the little article that had that, and there was a note, an addendum, and a appendage, if you will, on this. You said this is B.S.? Basically. Oh, really?

It was from an English professor who said that at this time in 1648, in the mid-17th century, there was no standardized punctuation. And so even a poet writing something, sending it off to the printer, would not necessarily expect the printer to follow his punctuation to a T. I think it's a bit of a lame explanation. Why even go to the trouble?

Yeah. Maybe this professor was saying the printer himself could have added this, and that it wasn't the poet's intent, and that it was just accidental. I'm not sure. I like to think that, yeah, this guy had a tremendous amount of foresight. That's what I'm going to believe.

And in 1648, this Robert Herrick said, here's your first emoticon, everybody. Come back and find me in 2012. Yeah, I'm going to go with that story. That's what we're going with. So we had the emoticon, either beginning in 1648 or definitely beginning in 1982. And that's all we had to deal with for a good 13 years,

if it was the latter. And then in 1995, we finally get our first emojis. And we know where those came from, too. And believe it or not, everybody, they came from Japan. I know. No surprise, right? Right. It was a company called NTTD, Big C, Little O,

M, Little O. Docomo. We're going to call it Docomo, because that's what it spells. And they had two icons, a phone and a heart. And this is when in 1995, people had pagers. Yeah, beepers. Did you ever have a pager? Oh, yeah, I have tons.

Did you really? You had like two or three at a time, depending on what you needed. I don't think I did. I think when I got into the film business, I had to get a pager. But it was very, very soon after that my first Nokia phone came into play.

I didn't have a pager for years and years. I think I had a pager for like a year, if I remember correctly. Yeah. I mean, for those of you kids out there, there's probably plenty of kids who listen to us that have no idea what a pager is. All right, let's tell them.

It's like a little, I guess, digital thing that was the size of a, there you go. It was like the size of a cigarette pack, but you guys all vape, you don't smoke cigarettes. It was smaller than that. Okay, it was the size of... I don't even know what size it was. It was the size of a very tiny cell phone.

I guess we could say inches. It was about like two inches by an inch and a half. Which is some unknown amount of centimeters, right? But it was a very small little box and you carried it with you and... A little clip that you could put on your belt. It was a magic little box because somebody would call a number

that was associated with your pager and they would type in their phone number after the beep and hang up or press pound, I think, afterward. Then you hang up and then you got a little alert on that little thing you wore on your belt. Then it would be like beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. It was very annoying. And the person's number would be next to it.

And if they really needed to talk to you, they'd put 911 after it. Yeah, so you would then pull your car over, find a pay phone, call the number on your pager and say, you got the stuff. It'd be like, what's so important, right? Yeah. That was how people communicate with one another

before cell phones. It seems like 100 years ago and it's really funny that it was the mid 90s. Right, and then people said, well, why don't we just make phones more portable? And they're like, oh, that's actually, hadn't thought about that, good idea. Yeah, because they had back phones

and car phones at the time. Right. It was a thing. So the Japanese, the entire country of Japan had pagers in the early 90s. Yeah, they were early adopters. Yeah, for sure. And this Dokomo, they had a line called pocket bell pagers

and they were the ones that first added emojis. There was a heart and a phone. Yeah, the phone meant, call me the heart very sweetly. I love that the heart was one of the first ones, basically sending a message of love. And then later on in the 90s, late 90s, I guess, they streamlined that, got rid of those icons because apparently pocket bell pagers,

there were a lot of business people that used them and they weren't into it. So the teenagers were like, forget you then, Dokomo. We're out of here, we're going to Tokyo Messaging because they've got these little, what would eventually be called emojis. I love that the Dokomo, like they got all business, like they were like, we can't have the heart on there.

That reminds me of probably my favorite onion headline of all time. Man accidentally ends business call with, I love you. They're the greatest one ever. That's a good one. My favorite was always drugs win, war on drugs. Oh yeah. Did you see the video they made with, I think Lil Wayne,

where they were saying the DEA had tapped Lil Wayne to go carry out the war on drugs by doing all the drugs? Well, just a picture of his face, yeah. Yeah, but they used clips of him on his tour bus trying to talk, but he's just so wasted. He's not even making sense, but they clipped, they interspersed it in like it was a news report and he was doing a great job.

That's good stuff. It's funny too, after our 10 years of doing this, we've gotten to do so many cool things because of the show. And one of my favorite things ever still is that when we knew people at The Onion, they took my picture one day, and they'll still trot that out as area man. And I will be, my mug will be in an onion article every now

and then as area man. Yeah, shout out Joe Randazzo for getting us in there. Yeah, back in the day. Getting us in the office. All right, so, should we take a break? Oh, God, we haven't yet, have we? No, let's take a break and we'll be back to talk about where they went with DoCamo right after this.

["Docamo"] On the podcast, Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, man. So, Docomo said, we're done with you kids.

And then they said, oh, wait, God, come back. You're like a third of our business. We had no idea. Luckily, they had an engineer named Shigetaka Kurita. You're getting really good at the Japanese. Thank you very much. Very nice. I'm around it a lot.

And I guess Kurita-san, we'll go with that. He was working on a mobile internet platform called iMode. And he said, you know what? We're just trying to get some pretty basic thoughts across here, like on a mobile network, so like your phone, stuff like the news or the weather or something like that. Like headlines, literally news headlines

and what the stock market's doing or if it's sunny outside. Right, right. And stuff that's going to like repeat like pretty predictably over like fairly short timescale. So it's gonna be sunny this day and it's probably gonna be sunny again. So you're gonna go back to the sunny thing

over and over again. Rather than, you know, typing out sunny, what if he just had an icon of a sun? Right. And this is a huge breakthrough. And what this guy did was create the very first emojis for this iMode platform. And he actually coined the term emoji too.

Shigitaka Kurita. That's right. And there was a character limit, a 250 character limit, which is kind of the main reason behind why we have emojis is good. So like you said, he didn't have to type out sunny. He could use one character. And in 1999, sounded like the future back then.

Yeah, remember? It's crazy. He developed 176 of these initial emoticons for things dealing with the weather, sports, food and drink, love, of course. And like you said, he made up the word E, which was picture and moji, which was character. And that's where it comes from.

Yep. So the thing was then, you had, how many did he come up with? 200 and? 176 initial ones. Okay. So the thing is, is this whole mobile platform, iMode, again, this is 1999 we're talking about.

They had like 250 characters tops, but these broadband networks weren't invented yet. This was all like really lo-fi stuff still. So it was very much ahead of his time. So he kind of had to reverse engineer how to get these things across. They had a stroke of genius, since there was a finite number of these things,

rather than sending a picture from one phone to another, when one user wanted to send that emoji, they stored the pictures in the phone. Yeah. And then you could activate those emojis from a simple two alpha, I guess, two byte alphanumeric code. So when your phone got that right alphanumeric code,

it would produce a smiley face. Yeah, it really set the stage for what we have today. Yeah, you know? Yeah, Yumi was over there at this time. She was in Japan teaching, and she told me like, you know, I came back, and I was like, wait, we don't have texts, like everybody texts.

You don't have Hello Kitty? Right, exactly. And it was like years before, like Japan was definitely doing this fairly early compared to us here. Yeah, I remember seeing the first handheld cell phone that wasn't the big brick phone. I saw one of those in LA in the late 80s or early 90s,

like literally in a Hollywood back lot, some producer had a brick phone. It's like, oh my God. But the first cell phone cell phone I ever saw was in London. And I guess it would have had to have been 95 or 96. And I had never seen one. Was it like this big rectangle

with the flip down mouthpiece in the pull up antenna? Something like that. It may not have had the flip down, but it was, you know, it was smaller than a brick phone. But I just remember thinking while like London, that they're on the leading edge of technology here. Sure. I've never seen that before.

Yeah. What in the world is that guy doing? Yeah, hey man, let me see that thing. All right, so many years passed, more, they call them, I don't even know how much they call them emojis or icons back then probably. Well, no, the guy had coined the term emojis.

Yeah, but I just don't know if it was like the popular term at the time. I see, I think it was in Japan. Okay, yeah. Again, ahead of the thing, ahead of the curve. Yeah, I just want to make sure that that's been gotten across. Very much ahead of the curve.

All right, in 2010, a company called Unicode Consortium. Well, it wasn't a company, it was the Unicode Consortium. Yeah. They're a nonprofit. And they're a group of tech companies and volunteers from the tech industry that basically really understood this stuff, saw the writing on the wall or the emoji on the wall and where it was going.

And they says, why don't we do this? We need to create a library. It needs to be standardized because I remember early on with smartphones, different platforms, someone would send you an emoji from an Android, an iPhone, it wouldn't come across. So they said, we need to standardize this

so it can operate across all iOS devices. Yeah, or even if the phones had the same emojis, they might not use the same codes. Right. So you might get like the opposite of what you're looking for. You're looking for a peach and you get an eggplant. Right, exactly.

And they're like, wow, what are you trying to say, man? So there was this great need for uniformity, but it didn't come out until, what year was it? 2010? Yeah. So this Unicode Consortium and the Daily Mail, by the way, called it the Unicorn Consortium, if you noticed.

And I called it the Unicode Consortium. Either way. Can you pronounce it both ways? I think the Brits do that. And that's what you saw your first cell phone, so. Full circle. Yeah. So Unicode got together and they said,

we're gonna make this this like collective open source nonprofit effort to encode these things and create a universal standard. And in doing so, they've made what some people point to as we'll see as one of the first universal languages. Yeah, and also. But it's not really. Strangely, it shocked me to know that no one owns this.

I love that. There is no patent or IP property rights to emojis. I love that. It's great, but it's kind of shocking that something so ubiquitous, like no one's making money off of it. I love that. No, it's wonderful.

Yes. And so rare, that's why it's shocking. It is, now we should say that some people point to the Unicode consortium being dominated by some major, major companies. I think Google and Apple really have a lot of people in there. Oh yeah. But again, it's a nonprofit group

and there are rules that are followed. I think the implication is that if Google or Apple puts up some suggestions, which they do sometimes, they may have a little more likelihood of getting passed than other people's emojis, maybe. Probably. And then also, since they're both American companies, the universal set of emojis tend to skew

a little more American, like hot dogs and hamburgers and French fries are there, and now they're just now starting to get to euros and things like that. Those are not too huge downfalls in return for this thing being open source and unowned by anybody, except for the entire world. Right, but one huge downfall because it's open source

and anyone can do anything with these emojis is that we got the Emoji Movie because some Hollywood executive was like, we don't have to pay for this. We can just go out and make a movie. We'll be the first one with an Emoji Movie. And since we don't have to pay for it, we can put all of that money

into making something really great, and they did. I didn't see it obviously, but I remember when it was announced there would be an Emoji Movie. I just remember thinking, oh, come on. Well, it really delivered on that reaction from what I understood. Yeah, I mean, I think it was a bomb in all respects. But they still made like four times what they put into it.

I think the box office was like 200 million and they spent like 50 million on it. I don't know, but I will say this, I have no idea what it's about at all. It's about emojis. But I know, but my prediction, having not seen it or read anything about it, is that it was some dumb story

about the different emotions coming together in the end to solve some problems. I'm sure you're right. I'm sure Hugh Jackman was in it and Jared from Subway was beaten up by a bunch of people. Yeah, and then there was a Sharknado. Although one of the guys who used to be on Silicon Valley, T.J. Mitchell?

T.J. Miller. Miller, he was in it. And so I was looking up the Emoji Movie and he apparently is accused of making a bomb threat. Real man, I just saw that. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, he, I don't know how he's doing. That article made me worry for him.

Yeah. I think he got in some argument on a train with a lady. And then was taking off the train and called in a bomb threat on the train. That she had a bomb. Right. And you can't do that, T.J. Allegedly, allegedly.

Allegedly, yeah. You can't do that, T.J. Miller. No, you really can't, man. But yeah, I lay all this at the feet of the Emoji Movie because he was the star of it. Absolutely. What was he, was he the eggplant or the peach? I don't know.

Well, if he was the star, then he probably would have been crying with laughter because in 2017, I believe for three straight years, 15, 16 and 17, crying with laughter was the most popular emoji. Which I have issue with that. And in 2015, it was actually, this is what I have a problem with,

Oxford Dictionary chose it as the word of the year. I don't have a problem with that part. Really? Yeah, that shows Oxford Dictionary is keeping up with the ever-evolving language. They're descriptivists, not prescriptivists. All right. That makes them A-okay in my book.

So what's your problem? My problem is that that means that crying with laughter is overused. None of the people, maybe 100th of 1% of the people who sent the crying with laughter emoji. We're literally crying. Or actually crying with laughter. So it's overused, like laugh out loud.

How many people are like LOL? Like that's not what that means, everybody. You ruined it. You ruined laughing out loud and you're ruining the crying with laughter emoji. So you're saying literally if you're crying with laughter is the only time you can send that. Not just saying, hey, that's really funny.

Yes. All right. I think it would be a much better world if that were the case. Okay. I just think it's overused. And I think that's part of the, I think it's one reason why everybody's so cynical

and sarcastic is because we're so out of touch with our emotions that we have the simulacrum to stand in for us instead of actually experiencing. And everything has to be so much bigger and bolder than it actually is. There's no subtlety or nuance, which is ironic because there's tons of subtlety and nuance in actually communicating with emoji.

Right. I mean, there's like a medium laughter emoticon probably, right? I'm sure probably. Or emoji. But it's the same thing as using exclamation points. You get trapped in it, you know what I'm saying? So like all of a sudden,

if you take away the exclamation points, people are like, are you mad at me? What's wrong? I've definitely gotten in text exchanges, like, hey, do you wanna go do this thing or whatever? And if someone sends back, sure. You do that. Or yeah.

You do that a lot. If you just send back sure, it's like, well, I guess Chuck's not very happy about this. I guess I'll start adding exclamation points. No, but you shouldn't have to is my point. You should not have to. And I think we just need to rip the bandaid off. I don't ever wanna see an exclamation point

on you again that you don't mean. Much less a double. The one that really is unsettling is when somebody replies with sure period and the S is lower case. That means things are not going well right then. Sure. Yeah, you don't want me to be a phony.

Because when I say sure, I mean, sure. But that's how I say it in my head. But I guess lower case sure period is definitely. That's saying something. Adding the period onto a lower case word, you're sending a message. But if you're not, if you're just saying sure, like normally, that's the problem

with text-based communication. It lacks context. It lacks emotion, which is how we're used to communicate. Any kind of text-based. That's what I'm saying, like just let it, right? That you have to add some sort of punctuation. That's the role that emojis fulfill. And we'll talk about that after a break.

How about that? Sure, lower case period. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, so we'll go over some interesting stats here. 92% of people use emojis online. What? That's a, that's almost everybody. Wow. Surprising? Yeah. And the other 8%, I don't know.

The other 8% have their arms folded and they're like, I'm not gonna do it. Darn it. That's right. We've been dancing around this peach and eggplant thing long enough. Oh, are we getting there now? Well, we might as well.

So these have famously become stand-ins for body parts. Right, like the peach is in like the Allman Brothers sense of the word. Is that what they meant? Yeah. Never really thought about that. Oh yeah. Eat a peach, huh?

All right, so it soon became a thing to send a peach with an eggplant. I am so old and out of that loop that I didn't know this was a real thing. I didn't either until this article. And I was like, oh yeah, obviously. Well yeah. In any sense, especially after reading about it,

I'm like, then you look at the eggplant, you're like, uh, geez. Yeah. Yeah. Um, another famous emoji is the poop icon. Sure. It's one of the most ubiquitous, very popular in Japan.

And it has become- It's huge in Japan. Popular in America with its fun little googly eyes. And I think, didn't Google even have flies buzzing around the poop? The first poop, which was a little much, frankly, but yeah, I think back in like 2008 or something like that, Google came out with their own poop icon for Gmail 2007.

And they put flies around it and it was just gross. But they, it's since somebody added the googly eyes later on and now it's like a mascot. Yeah. The poop emoji without the eyes is like gross. Like what's wrong with you? Why would you send that? It's like, sure, period.

Right. Right. But the poop with googly eyes is like sure exclamation point. Right. Okay. I think you're right. I'm following along. And there's been a lot of kind of,

I would call them faux controversies over the years. Like just last year, Google in 2017 had a cheeseburger icon that had the cheese under the meat patty and people went berserk. That's really stupid that people went berserk, but- It's also stupid to put the cheese under the meat. Yeah. It's just a weird choice.

Who did that? Was the person who make that never see a cheeseburger before? It's a really ducking stupid thing to do. But if it was somebody who really had never seen a cheeseburger before, then God bless them. And I feel bad for them for the outrage they created because even if, even if they put the bun on upside down, even if they'd left off the ketchup,

it doesn't matter. It still looks like a cheeseburger. I know. Settle down. I still wonder if they do some of that stuff that these programmers or designers or coders or whoever does these, they do that on purpose just to rib people.

Like I'm gonna put the cheese under the- Watch this. Yeah. We're gonna set the internet on fire. And they did. Apparently the CEO of Google, I did not know that this was the CEO of Google, Sundar Pachai.

Okay. He said we are going to drop everything else we are doing to go sort this out. Yeah. I imagine fairly sarcastically. I would think so, sarcastic emoticon. Right. Whatever that is.

That is like, I don't know what that would be. I think you gotta use, I don't know what you would, what is a sarcastic emoticon. I bet there's one people use and we're just not hip to that, would be my guess. Another word is old. There was a survey from match.com that claimed

that people who used emojis had sex more often than those people who didn't. Apparently the wine emoji is huge in Britain and Australians love their drug related emojis. We're gonna be in Australia. That's right. So we're gonna find out what that's all about when we're down end.

And of course we need to talk about the skin tone. Very early on, it was, I think in 2015, the Unicode Consortium changed the default skin tone to what they call Simpsons Yellow. But then you had the ability to tint them to different, I think five different skin tones to represent at least five different shades of skin. Right.

Which was a good start. Right, it was a good start. And I mean, they are still just getting going. There's plenty that have been left off. Like they just now are starting to add redheads to things and curly haired people. That's crazy. Which is crazy cool that they're adding it.

But yeah, there's always somebody who's feelings are hurt because they're left out by the emoji people every year. They also say that too many smiley faces, if you're dealing with work, and if you're dealing with work, maybe avoid emojis would be my guess. It depends on who you're talking with.

I mean, if it's a friend or whatever. Yeah, it depends on your job too. Yeah, if you're in banking and you're communicating with a client you've just met. It depends on what job it is too, of course. Sure. But there is apparently a study out there that said,

contrary to what you think, using too many smiley emoticons don't increase your perception of warmth. They decrease perception of competence. I totally get that. But this study was from the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. It was a 2017 study and they said,

not only is a smiley face emoji not a smile, it has some of the opposite effects. Which is like, I mean, it totally makes sense if you think about it. Somebody's smiling, you're like, oh, I want to be around that person. Somebody's sending you a bunch of smiley faces, and you're like, oh, what an idiot.

You know? Yeah. It's really easy to cross that line. Well, yeah, and it's also really easy to get in trouble. Do not send emoji threats because that's a real thing. There have been people all over the world that have been arrested for sending like handgun emojis to people that they were angry at and getting arrested

for making like actual threats. Threats, right. That counts legally. Which, so that raises some questions about what emojis are. Are they language? Are they art? There's actually, I want to give,

there's this guy, I think he's a rapper actually, named Young Jake, Y-U-N-G, Jake. So the absence of the O in Young indicates he might be a rapper. Young? Right. Young Jake? Young Carl.

But Young Jake is an emoji portraitist. Oh man, that stuff was so cool. Isn't that awesome? Yeah. So this guy does portraits of people, like really good portraits, strictly from emojis, layered in really interesting ways. He's got like a really great Instagram

to check out too, Y-U-N-G, Jake. But go check that one out. And then there's also a dude named Fred Benenson. And he translated a Moby Dick into emojis. Wow. It's called emoji dick. And every word of every line of a Moby Dick has been translated into emojis.

And this guy did this right. He hired three people to translate every single line. And then he hired another group of people who would look at each line and then look at the line of text and say, this is the one of the three that best gets this across for every line. So you can get an emoji dick online

for 200 bucks for hard copy. $200? But I think he sells it by the PDF for five bucks. And is Moby Dick represented by an eggplant and a peach? Terrible. Or at least the eggplant. So there's a lot of, like it's obvious that emoji is art. But there's a lot of people out there,

linguists included, who are saying emoji is words too. And it may be a language that's developing in front of our eyes. It's pretty interesting. As it stands now though, technically if you're a linguist it is not a language because it lacks grammar, which is structures that allow you to take words and put them into different combinations

to create higher thoughts. Emojis do not yet allow us to do that because there's not real rules. Yeah, but there are people studying it. This one article you sent, a woman named Rachel Tetman, a linguistics PhD candidate from University of Washington. Go Huskies. She did some studies where she would show people pictures,

like photographs, and then say, how would you emoji that description of that picture? Right, right. And there were different pictures that were subtly different. I mean, they were obviously different. The first one was a man counting money. And she would say, would you say what this picture's doing

by emoji man, emoji dollar bill, or emoji dollar bill, emoji man? And the results, I mean, it seemed like she didn't get a lot that were 50-50 for any of these. It seemed like most of them that she got were like 75 to 80% of people kind of siding one way or the other as far as far as... Yes, as she said.

As far as order goes, so she believes kind of firmly that she's proven that they're bi-directional. Well, it depends. It depends. So with the one of the man counting money, 80% of the people said that they would depict that emoji-wise with man and then dollar bill. And the reason why, she said,

was because there was an agent-patient relationship. The agent was the man acting on the money, the patient, and it was very clear. So there's really only one way to say it. Man money, man is counting money, very much like a subject and a predicate in a sense. That's one way they could act. They can also be...

They can also kind of describe the layout of a photo, too, if there's not a very strong agent-patient relationship. Right, so her takeaway, basically, is that they can represent the physical arrangement of things and also words. So another one was a picture of a man walking past a castle. And the castle's basically the big part of the picture

and the man's pretty small, but the man is in the lower right corner. So most people said that they would do castle man, because the man's not acting on the castle, the castle's not acting on the man. But that's the way they see it. Yeah, and that's the way it's arranged in the picture. That's what I would do.

So she was saying that it can mimic the structure of sentences, and it can also mimic the structure of pictures, which makes emoji definitely their own thing. But the whole reason, the whole point of emoji, the reason that we use them, there's a guy named Viv Evans. I think he's at a banger university.

He is a huge proponent of emojis as a new way to communicate, rather than a step backwards. Because there's a lot of people, probably people who hate vocal fry, are like, emoji's so stupid, anybody uses emoji's stupid, and it's a giant step backwards for language.

Which is why I think the Oxford English Dictionary was making such a statement, by choosing the crying face as the word of the year, they were casting their lot on the side of emojis as being a new form of communication. So Viv Evans is like, yes, that's absolutely true. And what they do is they stand in for things like gestures and intonation,

things that are missing in a strictly text-based message, like texting, or Twitter, or an email. And that's what emojis do, they add emotion, they convey nuance to it that otherwise isn't there. And they're fun. Sure. Like get the stick from your peach. You can stick out of your peach

and have a little fun with emojis. You know what's funny, Chuck, is apparently the mystery has never been solved as to exactly why eggplant is in there in the first place. It's kind of a weird one to add, considering we didn't have redheads until recently, or curly-haired people, but there's always been an eggplant. It makes you wonder.

Yeah, for sure. And this is the last thing I've got was something you sent, which is kind of a cool move. Apple wants to be more inclusive with their emojis, so they are proposing, as a starting point, and not a comprehensive list, they're proposing, including emojis, to represent people with disabilities.

So things like a man or woman with a cane, prosthetic legs and arms, guide dogs, hearing aids, people in wheelchairs, stuff like that. Right, and those would be part of Emoji 12.0, which would come out in March of 2019, and they just released Emoji 11.0 to the public, which includes the partying face, cupcakes. Is that what this huge list is?

Yeah. It's available now. They're going to be available on phones in August, but what the list was released to the public. And this Unicode consortium, they take all these under advisement, but they also put them out into the public to say, what do you guys think about these two?

Right. And there's a few that they will never take. They never will accept one of a living person, a deity, or a business logo. All those are off the table immediately. But then other ones, they wanna make sure aren't too specific and that they're pretty even personal. Like the golden arches, you'll never see something like that.

No, not as long as it's open source. Interesting. But there are some pretty good ones coming down the pike this August. I wonder what Super Villain is. It's a guy twisting his mustache. It's kind of like Dr. Strange or Professor Strange or whatever.

Dr. Strange. Kind of like Popcaller cape. Okay. So you've seen these? Yeah, it obviously gets across, especially when it's next to the superhero one, that it's the Super Villain. I think my favorites coming soon are Nazar Amulet.

I don't even know what that is. I don't either. Mosquito, that seems relevant. There's one that's coming that's probably the best emoji of all time, the clown face. Oh, that's not a thing yet? It's really well done. Yeah, cause that's so versatile.

It is, but it's also like a good looking emoji. Yeah. Is it a scary clown or no? No, it's a great, perfect, universally beautiful clown. And I can't remember, you know, we did our clown episodes, so I can't remember if it's an August clown or what type of clown it is, but it's a great clown.

And you can see all these, by the way, at Emojipedia. I just saw it. Oh, what'd you think? Did you see it? Mm-hmm. I saw it in theaters. I thought it was good. The guy who did Pennywise,

I can't remember which brother he was. He's a scars card. That's what you say. We don't know. We'll never know. But he did just an amazing job. Yeah, and I had no skin in the game. I had never read any of it

or seen any previous versions at all. And I just thought it had a lot of heart and was creepy. And I thought it was really good. I thought it was good too, but you could also tell that Stranger Things had come out while they were writing this and were like, oh, let's retool this a little bit

to really hit the Stranger Things crowd. I don't think that's true. I think it is true. I think that script was locked long before Stranger Things came out. And I think they retooled it. You got anything else on emojis? Well, the kid from Stranger Things is in it.

That was a little on the nose. I'm curious about the timeline there. So there's another one coming out too. It's a dude with a fro who looks exactly like Slim Goodbody that's coming out in emoji PDLA. Wait, who's Slim Goodbody again? Remember the guy who wore the suit that showed his internal organs and all that

from back in the day? Yeah, with the appro. Looks just like Slim Goodbody. And then there's a mind blown one and a vomiting one too. But the clown's the best one, okay? I'm excited. Do you want to know more about emojis?

Go out, go forth, start talking in emojis. It's pretty interesting. And since I said it's interesting, it's time for listening to me. I'm gonna call this Meals on Wheels. We got a lot of great follow up from people who were in fact inspired to go out and join Meals on Wheels.

Yeah, that's pretty neat. Which was best case scenario, exactly what we and Meals on Wheels was hoping for. So, hey guys, thanks for your commitment and awesomeness. I've been an avid listener for the past few years. You're my go-to for workouts and long car rides. The weeks ago, I heard your episode of Meals on Wheels was absolutely blown away.

I'm not sure if it was the sliding scale model or just the overall effects of the program, but you encouraged me to sign up to serve with my local community center that offers Meals on Wheels in central Ohio. He's in Columbus. Yeah. After getting fingerprinted a few days ago,

I guess you gotta do that. Sure, they don't want any weirdos. Nope. I am awaiting confirmation, like weirdos with no fingerprints. Right. I'm awaiting confirmation before going in my first and only shadow ride before being a driver myself.

The program is very easy to learn and I was surprised to hear that most drivers are actually between the ages of 50 and 60. I signed up for once a week for about two hours and that is considered average. Highly encourage anyone of any age to look for the opportunity, look into this for Meals on Wheels.

As you can do things like food prep, administration work and more. I know if I would have signed up, I don't know if I would have signed up if not from learning about it on your program. Man, that's awesome. Yeah, that is from Dalton Schaefer. Good work, Dalton.

And Dalton wrote back after I told him he was gonna be on Listener Mail. Said, tell Josh, I live in Columbus now and I purposefully do not say the Ohio State University and the natives are getting restless and angry. Be careful, Dalton, be careful, watch yourself. Thanks for signing up for Meals on Wheels. We want you to stay alive

so you can keep delivering Meals on Wheels. And for lots of other reasons. Sure. If you did something pretty great because we told you to, well, we wanna hear about that. You can tweet to us at S.Y.S.K. Podcast at Josh M. Clark or at Movie Crush or slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcastathousetoforks.com and is always joining us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called

on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, you're everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.